Wednesday, June 25, 2008

It's Surprisingly Un-Smokey in Here

So, the office I work in has been filled with construction workers building more interior offices (Yay! No one likes offices with windows! Seeing outside is for losers!) for about 2 months. And they occasionally trip the fire alarm. It's no big deal, we're used to it.

So this morning, the fire alarm started going off around 9:40. Never consistently, never for longer than 20 seconds at a time, and not in regular intervals. We all cursed the construction workers under our breath, and continued working. And tried not to make phone calls.

Um, yeah, there was a real fire. On the 8th floor (I'm on the 7th), in the electrical system of the elevator I use every day. At around 10, we were told to evacuate by the office manager, and I literally had to call my boss and say, "hey, real fire, maybe get out of the building?"

The entire building (11 floors of it) had evacuated pormptly, except my company. And when we did evacuate, the firemen yelled at us. So we did what any good office worker would do: ignore them and go to Starbucks.

4 comments:

rebekah said...

Ours does that all the time. Twice this week. I'm not sure what we would do during a real emergency.

Anonymous said...

You be careful!!! The fire alarm at home still goes off every time I use the broiler!! It's the old "Dinner will be served when the fire alarm goes off" routine. Did you have to walk down eight flights? How was your knee?

Anonymous said...

Guys in my high school used to trip the fire alarm all the time. It was no big deal.

Lizzle said...

I can remember being in college and one of the high-rise dorms CONSTANTLY had fire alarm troubles... And it wasn't because people were smoking in their rooms or burning popcorn all the time. In fact most of the time it was because someone had left their window open and the temperature was too extreme in one direction or the other and tripped the alarm. There are few things more hilarious than walking past several hundred shivering freshmen who brought their books outside because they had to cram all night for a test and this is the 34th fire alarm of the month, so they knew they were going to be out there for a while!